April 22, 2007

The Odd Recommendation...

Modeled on the famous Nurse With Wound List from 1979/1980, the Vas Deferens Organization included an even longer list of interesting and (mostly) obscure musical artists with their 1996 CD Sweat Your Cheeses, But Not In My Salad. The overlap with the NWW list is quite large, covering the best of kraut, psych, prog, bizarre, experimental, free improvisation, and everything in between, updated for the swinging 90s. By now, most serious collectors have probably tracked down nearly the whole NWW list, at least in MP3 form, and are eagerly looking for new challenges. So here is "The Odd Recommendation...", all 597 names from the VDO-list, reproduced in its original form (including typos), after the jump.

Everything you always wanted to know about the obscure corners of the original NWW list can be found in WilliamBerger's excellent series Adventures in the NWW List (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), and Mutant Sounds and Direct Waves have more MP3s than any sane person can handle. Now will someone do for this list what TGK did for the old one?

Comments

I remember when this disc came out and I looked for many of these LPs in the FMU library, surprised to find quite a bunch. What should be mentioned though, is that VDO is one of the contributors to the Mutant site, so I'm sure you're going to see more and more of it coming to life there.

Looks like lots of RIO and Japanese avant-prog has been added, and lots of the "electronic music for experimental ballet"-style music from the original NWW-list has been stripped out.
And like the original list, there seem to be some entries that are there as nothing more than because they're "personal favorites" of the list-maker rather than exemplifying some sort of historical significance ("El Tarro de Mostaza," anyone?!?!).
Personally, I'm very happy to see Dr. John get his due.

Although this list can be useful to discover bands, one has to admit that this is list is definitely less experimental oriented than the Nurse with wound one :

Most of the free jazz artists have been dropped out (even though the original list missed a lot of them, showing that Stapleton wasn't exactly fond of free jazz), many experimental artists disappeared as well (from noise to simply "out" music), and almost no contemporary composer is included here.

On the other hand, prog-rock and RIO bands have been massively added. I guess this list doesn't aim at the same audience, and is probably also less exhaustive than the NWW one according to its release date.

Given their tastes, I'm surprised Bourbonese Qualk were not included on the list. Actually there are quite a few bands that are surprisingly absent in these strains...Cardiacs also come to mind. Hmm, maybe we need to make another list for the last 00's?